I Got a First Class Degree During a Pandemic, a Court Case, Multiple Bereavements and a Goddamn Identity Crisis

El Amethyst
Jul 22
8 min read

Updated: Jul 27

I did it. After six years of relentless, soul-stripping, mind-blowing life and study, I’ve got a First Class Honours Degree in Social Sciences with Sociology from the Open University. Let that land.

First Class. With Distinctions. While the world burned and my own life flipped inside out.

I’ve written pieces before... some raw, some poetic, some halfway through the storm... but this is the one that gets to name it. To look backwards and forward in one breath. This is the one I wish teenage me could read, the one I wish systems would take seriously, the one that proves that learning isn’t about ivory towers... it’s about guts, care, survival, and purpose.

NOTE

This isn’t about showing off. This is about showing up.

I’ve spent years clapping for everyone else, pouring love into their milestones, their messes, their magic and now it’s my turn to learn how to do the same for myself.

This post is not for praise. It’s for presence.

For giving my journey the same awe, care, and respect I instinctively give others.

Because survival deserves celebration. Because pride is not arrogance it’s reclamation.

And because sometimes the quietest victories need the loudest colours

So here I am... rainbow highlighter in hand, saying" I did this"

The Real Timeline

OU Degree & Life

2019–2025

Let’s drop the bullshit and tell it like it was.

2019 Burned Bridges, Rebuilt Purpose

Completed HND Photography after re-entering education in 2016 to reclaim my voice post-trauma.

My final graded unit, Abandonment, scored 91%... highest mark I’d ever gotten... and I felt like I’d finally arrived.

But I wasn’t accepted into the Degree Year. They said my interview technique was lacking and didn’t understand my vision for therapeutic photography... mental health-based, not commercial enough. Too healing. Not conceptual. Basically, not the kind of ‘art’ they could box and sell.

Confidence shattered. But then... I pivoted... Took a deep breath. Enrolled in NC Psychology and Criminology. That was the beginning of something.

2020 Double Study & Lockdown Breakdown

Started Open University part-time Social Science degree while also doing full-time NC Psych & Criminology at college.

Turned 40. Daughter threw me a surprise party. Cried in the kitchen because the people responsible for my birth were never the parents I needed, so the milestone hit differently.

Lockdown hit. Began writing weekly emotion journals on my blog to survive.

The Highlights (or lowlights?)

Week 5

Realised sociology was my language... layered, wide-angle, inquisitive

Week 23

Applied for a crisis grant. Felt like all my dreams... photography, home, helping survivors... were impossible

Week 27

Wrestling with working-class trap... can’t afford to not work, but working would wreck our already thin-stretched support system, not to mention the slither of financial stability

Week 28

Epic career consultation: “You’ve been a carer for 20 years. That’s a job. You’re articulate. You’re skilled.” It cracked something open!

Week 29:

Felt the ache of studying inequality while living inside it

Week 44

Shaved my hair off, after spending a weekend in hospital with one of my kids. Reclaimed myself. Became El Amethyst. Got 85% on my first module but it felt like background noise to the grief and rage

2021 Court & Carry On

Five years of Legal process finally met an end: October, court date against daughter’s abuser.

Kept studying. Kept caring. Kept breathing.

🏳️‍🌈 2022 Grief, Queerness, & Getting Real

Pride Month blog... publicly reflected on my identity.

Came out... loud and layered... as a queer, polyamorous, panromantic, Demisexual, lesbian. Yep, all of that.

Mother died. Grief hit harder for what never was than what ended.

Then my Nana died... my true maternal anchor. That cracked me open differently.

Continued OU study through it all.

Christmas Day: began experiencing symptoms of a rupturing ectopic pregnancy... Reyvinn. I was dying and didn’t even know it yet.

2023 Surgery & Study & Stubborn Survival

Jan 11: Scan confirmed ectopic. No baby.

Jan 12: Emergency surgery.

March seen me throwing myself into the Queer community to stop dark spirals. The beginning of meeting ‘my people’. Glasgow Lesbian Scene. Including exploring new polyamorous relationships. Summer Solstice!

More queer community and photography with Oban Lesbian Weekend

All whilst Grieving Reyvinn... a named, wanted, sacred child.

Finished Exploring Religion module with a Distinction... even though religion was my most complicated subject to study.

2024 Adventures & The Great Migration

Adventures in Turin and Dublin - expanding on this new found travelling experience

August–November: Packed up 20 years of life and memory. Left Central Belt.

November... Moved to Arbroath. Sea healing. Cliffs grounding. Sanctuary.

Did all this while still studying.

More personal growth, rediscovering my old poetry with less judgment, led to writing more.

Supported family’s mental health fallout from the upheaval. Still parenting. Still caregiving.

🌊 2025 Crisis, Completion, and Clarity

January–June... Final OU assignments. Deadlines and devotion. Navigating complicated social heartaches. In-between it all Lanzarote with the youngest two.

April... Son’s mental health hit breaking point. He moved in with us, sleeping on the sofa, needing safety while seeking sobriety.

May...Finished final essay on Capitalism and the Climate Crisis.

July... Graduated with First Class Honours in BA (Hons) Social Sciences with Sociology.

Joined the Angus Pride committee. Bringing crazy dogged determination, organisational skills that got me through Open Uni, sociology, photography, and soul.

What I Actually Studied (OU Modules)

DD102 – Introducing the social sciences (Feb–Sept 2020) – Pass

DD103 – Investigating the social world (Oct 2020–May 2021) – Distinction

DD218 – Understanding digital societies (Oct 2021–May 2022) – Distinction

A227 – Exploring religion (Oct 2022–May 2023) – Distinction

DD310 – Counselling & forensic psychology (Oct 2023–May 2024) – Grade 2 Pass

DD318 – Social theory: changing social worlds (Oct 2024–May 2025) – Distinction

That’s 360 credits of brain, heart, and sheer bloody resilience.

So yeah... BA (Hons) Soc Sci (Open). Me. El. The kid with average C grades. The full-time carer. The chronically overwhelmed, under-rested, queer, neurodivergent, grief-battered, creative-raging soul. I did that.

But this isn’t just about the grade — it’s about the journey. And holy shit, it was a journey.

📚 What Studying with the OU Was Really Like 📖

It was earlymorning study sessions when Im not a morning perdon but my learning brain is. While a cat tried to claim my notes as a napping throne.

It was trauma chapters that required pacing breaks and tear-drenched journaling.

It was deadline week and being 20 words short with a rainbow book club novel waiting as my reward.

It was colonialism, Christianity, and queering everything I thought I knew about therapy, gender, and power.

It was also, unexpectedly, home.

“Perceptions Create Reality”

...and Sociology Gave Me the Tools to See That

Through the lens of my Instagram, my sociology learning looks like cliffs and candlelight, protest banners and textbooks scrawled with rage. It’s every selfie taken after crying through a chapter on systemic injustice, every quote I underlined with trembling hands because someone finally named what I’ve lived. Sociology gave me the language for things I already knew in my bones ...

the way power hides in plain sight, the way class, gender, race, and disability shape everything from playgrounds to parliaments

It helped me see that reality isn’t fixed

... it’s shaped.

Shaped by the media, education, religion, social norms, policies, ideologies.

And those shapers? They’re sneaky. They get in under your skin, disguised as “common sense.”

Sociology handed me the mirror and said "Look again"

And I saw myself

not as broken, but dogged, stubborn truth seeker

The Sociological Imagination Is a Gift and a Curse

Once you see the web, you can’t unsee it!!!

I saw how colonialism embedded itself in cities and sacred sites

How the “therapy room” has too often been a battleground for queer souls

How sexual “myths” have deformed intimacy, and how a society’s shame can infect our bodies

But I also saw this...

Truth is liberating.

Knowledge is a radical act.

And studying sociology as a queer, neurodivergent carer in a broken world was activism!!!

🌈 OU Wasn’t Just a University — It Was Resistance🌈

The Open University met me where I was in my council house and in grief, in the in-between moments of carer life, on the brink of burnout and still scribbling notes in the margins of parenting.

I learned with people I’ll never meet but always feel

I built queer and feminist book club connections

I highlighted "Life Isn’t Binary" on one screen while watching its author lecture me on another.

I held space for trauma, truth, and tenderness... even when the study material hit too close.

I paced. I wept. I wrote. I aced it.

Want a Visual Recap?

Scroll my Instagram if you want to see the real degree journey...

[Open Uni Student @elriempath13]

Rainbow gradients and radical truths

Books that cracked open my brain

Deadlines survived with cats, coffee, and queer lit

Pages of notes, posts on grief, and lessons in unlearning

Every post, every caption, every hashtag... it’s all part of the degree too.

🎓 So What Now?

Now, I carry those letters

BA (Hons) Soc Sci (Open)

not as a title but as a testimony.

To the version of me who nearly qui

To the child who thought they were average

To the survivor who turned knowledge into healing

To the queer, loving, complicated adult still unlearning and unshaming and unf*cking the systems inside

I don’t know what comes next... but I know I’ll face it with a sociological imagination and a heart that beats in intersectional rhythm!

I’m continuing to Develop my therapeutic photography, Write my memoir,

Support LGBTQ+ communities with Angus Pride, Advocate for inclusive, trauma-informed justice...

And maybe study a few philosophy modules... just for fun (because apparently I can’t stop learning now that I’ve started!)

Final Thought 🤔

What Sociology Taught Me

Sociology helped me understand how our thoughts, feelings, and views are shaped... Our reality becomes most true the more diverse our education of different perceptions is!

It validated something I always knew deep down... that we are all socialised, conditioned, patterned. None of us are immune. But with enough curiosity, compassion, and a bit of fire, we can unlearn the shit that was never ours to carry.

learning isn’t just survival

it’s revolution.

And I? I’m not done yet.

This isn’t just a degree. It’s a fuck you to every gatekeeper who told me I didn’t fit. It’s a love letter to my younger self who kept going. It’s a promise to keep turning pain into purpose, stories into sparks, and care into revolution. It's an open door to my future self to never stop learning!

🎓 El Amethyst, BA (Hons) Social Sciences with Sociology, First Class, July 2025.

✨This is the part where I stop apologising for knowing things ✨